Growing up in
London -- or anywhere in
Britain -- in the
70s and
80s
bomb scares were a
fact of life. For every
genuine terrorist bomb
planted there were probably
half a dozen or more
false alarms, and it
became comparatively
commonplace to see
police cars screaming to a
halt outside a
tube station or
department store and quickly
clearing the surrounding area of
passers-by.
As a student I would work in the Oxford Street/Regent Street
department stores over Christmas and the New Year sales to earn
extra cash, and there was a special coded message which would be
played over the shop's tannoy to alert the staff that a suspicious
phone call had been received. Over the three-week period that I worked
there we only had about two evacuations so it was fairly quiet compared
with some other years.
What I didn't realise at the time is how much you take being in a
state of siege for granted. It's deeply ingrained in my brain that if I
see an unattended bag or briefcase anywhere in London I don't think
"oops, somebody has forgotten their luggage", but rather I think
"better call the police". What I found even more disturbing was just how
quickly I found myself falling back into that mode of thinking when the
IRA ceasefire broke with the bomb at South Quay in docklands --
it literally took just a few hours for everyone to re-adopt a
siege mentality.
Despite all this, it's worth pointing out that although bomb scares
(or security alerts as they're now called) happen with depresssing
regularity, there haven't been any major terrorist bombs in London for
nearly five years, and your chances of actually being injured by
such an occurrence are probably roughly on a par with winning the
lottery two weeks in a row. It always struck me as odd during the 1980s
that American tourists were worried about coming to London, when their own
home town may well have had more murders in a year than the whole of the
United Kingdom. It's annoying that we don't have bins on the tube though.